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“The Glowing Beings” a short story

kimcampion.com

The Glowing Beings

As a kid my bod looked unfortunately kind of weird. I had skinny wanky little arms and a bloated stomach. I did have long legs but they were crooked on account of imaginary nutrition. It wasn’t my parents’ fault exactly, what I mean to say is they did not deliberately decide to neglect me and not feed me, they were just young alcoholic addicts and the spacebag wine and huff had eaten their brains away. I was put into foster care at age six. I missed my parents at first because well, they were my parents. They were familiar and I loved them.

My foster parents weren’t all bad but they were holyrollers. When they told me my parents had passed away, I felt bad for my folks. Now they were going to have to hang out with Jesus all the time and he probably wasn’t going to let them watch TV or shoot their guns anymore. Jesus seemed like a real bummer, and kind of a weirdo as well. My foster parents told me he was always watching me. So I started changing my clothes in the closet with the lights off so pervy Jesus couldn’t see me naked.

As soon as I got a little older, I spent less and less time at my foster parents’ house. They didn’t understand my burgeoning anxiety and depression and they were just too jesusey. By the time I’d hit puberty I was all primed to start acting out on various issues. Also, I was beginning to get obsessive compulsive when it came to germs. Also, I was very interested but misguided when it came to sex.

In junior high I had a short foray into the world of prostitution. I wanted a smartphone and a guy I met at the 7-ll said he would get me one if I went with him to the Chinook Motel. The Chinook is on the Aurora Strip where the Green River Strangler used to kill prostitutes. This motel was gross. The “E” on the end of their neon sign was broken so the sign said “Nice Rat”.

The guy laughed at that and said “Nice Rat huh? What a joke. Ah well little sister…” and he seemed a little apologetic he was going to fuck me in the Nice Rat. He looked like he was in his late thirties and kinda dirty like he was a trucker who skipped some showers but he was surprisingly nice to me. When I knelt down on the carpet to blow him he said wait honey and he got a towel from the bathroom so my knees wouldn’t have to touch the cum shampooed carpet.

My obsession with germs served me well in this situation however. I may have been only thirteen but I knew about various plagues and sexually transmitted diseases. When he whipped his dick out I grabbed his bottle of Jack Daniels he’d brought along and poured some on his wiener like Florence Nightingale. What the hell? He said and he jumped back but then he seemed to think about it for a moment and said “Alrighty girl this gonna be some clean fuckin. This is like CSI level shit”.

I was perplexed and concerned by his reference to a crime scene show but I went ahead anyway and gave him a blowjob and then he put me on another towel on the bed and spread my legs and did me for a while. I did ask him to put a condom on. He agreed and afterwards he gave me five hundred dollars. Maybe he was high, or happened to be a trucker who also had a rich grandmother. It was a bizarre experience. I think because he was sort of nice to me in a way it made it way worse. It made me aware of how low my self esteem was and I never did it again.

I didn’t finish high school, I just couldn’t handle it. Plus, I thought I was too stupid to get it. For a few years I worked a variety of jobs like making donuts in the middle of the night and then some waitressing. After a few years of that I decided I wanted to attend community college and get my general education requirements finished so I could transfer to a university and perhaps major in something I actually would enjoy making a living at. I managed to get my GED and got accepted to a city college. But as soon as I was in I was looking at maybe having to drop out because my panic attacks were increasing.

I was taking so many showers a day my whole body was starting to get chapped. And I was now tripping about all kinds of random things. My head told me I wasn’t smart enough to be in school, but then it would flip around and say how stupid everyone else was. I was projecting negative fantasies into the future and visualizing being old and poor with saggy tits that looked like domesticated dog ears. People were bothering me a lot. They were starting to make me sick at the restaurant I was working at. I couldn’t stand watching people chew and hear the noises. And they weren’t even as bad as the ones I was hearing on the news, just a bunch of rich people wanting to steal everything from everybody else. And then the poor people actually voting for these rich criminals who lied to them! Most people just seemed so hopelessly retarded, myself included. Although I did see more electric cars on the road and that gave me hope.

I tried to be positive and focus on happy things but the fears and germ obsessions were now out of control. My boyfriend at the time tried to comfort me and told me he “once dated a chick who was way more wacked than you. She would take like 45 minutes to wipe her ass. ‘It ain’t clean ‘til it bleeds’ she’d say, in this Deliverance Ozarkian accent. I’d try to tell her to chill out, and just take a shower afterwards. That’s what I do. I take a shower every time after I take a shit, which everyone thinks is so weird but one time this guy told me it was because I had a past life as a Muslim. They apparently wash themselves after every single shit they take.”

I appreciated his trying to comfort me but eventually I decided to seek some professional help. So I went to a shrink who agreed to take me on a sliding scale. He instructed me to write down my life memories, starting with the earliest ones from childhood. And then read them to him. I didn’t want to lose my job and withdraw from my classes so I actually did what he said.

While I was writing about things that happened when I was five or six is when these certain memories came back. And they were bizarre. Because I recalled being abducted by aliens. And being taken up into outer space in their ship. I actually remembered looking at the earth from far away in space. I was looking at it through some kind of porthole and the earth was about the size of a shrinking soccer ball, receding into the distance with the stars. I was about five and I felt very safe and relieved wherever I was. It was actually the first time I ever felt the gorgeous freedom that is absence of fear.

I knew this memory wasn’t from TV or something. I knew it was real, and this wasn’t just me remembering a dream.

A few weeks after I wrote about this memory I recalled when the beings came back a second time. It was a couple years ago and I was alone in a room I was renting. I was having another panic attack. Then all of a sudden They were there. One was tall and had a neon green circulatory system. It was like all the veins on his body were glowing and flowing green light. He had a big head and small body just like people draw in the pictures.

Care and goodwill came out of him and I knew I was safe. He was smiling and holding up a small cylindrical object that was also glowing the same emerald light as his veins. He telepathically communicated to me that this object was something that someone’s creativity manifested. He simultaneously conveyed these two ideas to me: that this thing would help people and that to create was delightful. He had such light, exuberant and happy energy, and a real desire to help me. And then I was back in my room on the couch. It felt like a dream the way being in the hospital feels like a dream if they sedated you there, but you still know it really happened.

I knew how to calm my racing thoughts after I wrote down this memory and read it to my therapist. It was like this newfound gift. I realized the beings had done something to me when I was up there. All of a sudden I knew how to meditate. I was able to access this lesson now that it had risen from my subconscious. This was an important developmental marker for me because now I could continue going to school. The shitty negative fantasies and social anxiety and agoraphobic tendencies were lessening. I was getting better.

I managed to keep attending my classes. I didn’t have the money or time to take many for fun but I did enroll in an Intro to Art class that I loved. Then I started veering towards biology and medical type classes. They seemed pretty interesting and practical. I actually ended up graduating with a nursing degree. And started working in one of the most high stress and pressure places a person could- the ER. And not only did I do my job competently, I was able to inject calmness into people when they freaking out and they weren’t as afraid when they were around me. I liked to nurture them and the truth is, working in the ER was no more stressful than being a waitress. It isn’t easy but there are aspects of the job I find rewarding.

And another new thing happened. I took up painting in my spare time and this is unbelievable to me but I’ve started selling them. I’m not very good at the paint application itself, so what I do is sketch out the scene with a pencil, and then once I got it how I like it, I retrace the image with a waterproof ink pen. Then I paint in the colors. I started with watercolors, now I’m using oils. It’s basically just paint by numbers but I really enjoy it and think they turn out nice. I mostly paint portraits, of all different kinds of people. Some are naked, some have clothes on. All different kinds of nationalities too. The only thing they have in common is they all have oversized eyes and heads. They look a little like Modigliani’s portraits, except he made his eyes smaller.

My paintings are now hanging in a prestigious art gallery because of a patient I got to talking with one night who turned out to be an artist’s agent. I had no idea. He just presented with a mass in his abdomen and I was sitting with him while he was drinking the barium sulphate solution we need folks to ingest so we can take the proper xrays. He was having a hard time getting it down. I felt bad he had no family to sit with him so I took ten minutes to keep him company. In between sips he kept asking me questions about my life and hobbies so I told him about the paintings. He asked if he could see some of them and I showed him a few pictures of them on my cell phone. I was pretty shocked he thought they were good.

Turns out he just had a benign growth in the superficial muscular wall of his abdomen and was fine. A few months later he contacted me and asked if I was interested in representation. Because of the paintings I’ve sold, I’m now making enough money to quit work if I wanted. I haven’t desired to yet but it’s just miraculous to have that option.

Making art takes me back to a few good moments in my childhood. I liked the peace and quiet of being by myself and drawing. And the funny thing is, I remembered what subject matter I chose back then. I always used to draw these people with giant heads and skinny bodies when I was a kid. And when they asked you to draw your family or whatever in school all my people came out looking like the aliens. I didn’t remember any of that until I was about half way through the therapy.

I think it’s funny how many people don’t believe in aliens when I think they are probably coming here all the time. I know the highest echelons of the government know they exist. And I think they know these beings are helping people. The ones who kept visiting me are the cute grey ones but I figure there are all different kinds.

I like horror films about aliens but I know they aren’t realistic. Any beings still at a selfish greedy imperialism type level of consciousness would not be able handle the kind of technology required to travel to distant galaxies, even if they were capable of developing it. They’d have blown up their own planet in wars or trashed its environment too bad to survive.

The various kinds of aliens that visit earth all come from societies that are obviously very advanced spiritually. Since they didn’t destroy their environment during their own technological adolescence, they were thus able to survive and evolve to the point where they can travel around the universe and help the inhabitants of hillbilly planets like our own.

I am very grateful to my psychiatrist, Brian. At first I was nervous around him because my only experience with mental health professionals were when I was a kid and those ones sucked. But Brian had a different vibe. He looked like Morgan Freeman and had the same calm, and stately demeanor. He was very nice to me and I felt safe with him. I developed a deep trust bond with him. He was of course the first person I ever told about the alien memories.

This was a turning point for me and made me feel as though I could at some point discuss it with others, perhaps even a significant other. Brian is real smart. Medicine is his second career. Before that he was a pharmaceutical injury lawyer and he made a lot of money since the FDA got bought out by Big Business.

He says that was the main reason he decided to go to medical school and then specialize in Psychiatry was because he didn’t like that so many shrinks were essentially legalized drug dealers. He only prescribes medications to the genuinely mentally ill. He’s an extraordinary guy.

But the fact that he didn’t try to commit me when I told him I had been “abducted” by aliens is truly why I got better and have a healthy level of confidence. He didn’t think I was silly or crazy once I told him. He acted respectfully intrigued. He said his grandmother used to tell him a story about how when she was a little girl she saw a giant silver egg floating in the air over a cornfield in Michigan where she grew up. She called it an “angel boat”.

Brian and I finished our work together a while ago now. You’re generally not supposed to give your shrink gifts, but I painted a picture of his gramma and the silver egg and gave it him at our last session. He thanked me. I told him how grateful I was to him. The fact that I was able to share with another human (who didn’t judge me) what I remembered about these beings was something that profoundly changed me and raised my consciousness. I’m having so many more pleasant life experiences now.

When I first remembered spending time in those beings’ spaceship, I began fantasizing about getting to escape and be up there permanently with them. That was how I got through a lot of days at school and then at the hospital. But now I actually don’t mind being trapped on this planet. Now, I even think I kinda like it.